Umair Malik
When you get the required qualifications for various jobs by receiving your degrees, the first thing you think of is- how to fetch a job and at least attempt to get down to the nuts and bolts of your life. Everyone around sits tight for you to start your career. You try and fail, you keep on trying but you fail again and again. This puts too much stress over you because everyone around; the society, your family, your relatives have countless expectations from you. A stage arrives in your life where your mind gets flooded with several questions. A few of them being as- Should i continue to give it a try or should i switch to secondary plans? If i choose to go for the alternatives, what would the society think? You primarily become more focused to live up to the expectations of these people rather than truly focusing on your career. Do what is feasible and right for you and don’t just do things because everyone else expects you to. Remember that you are not enslaved to live up to everyone’s expectations.
There are hundreds of examples of brilliant graduates and postgraduates who unfortunately couldn’t find a job in their respective fields nor could they find any other decent job to satisfy their fundamental needs. Surely, one can argue here that being brilliant is not enough to fetch you a good job but you need to be a hardworking lad to get there. It is the hard work you put in that gets you to reap great benefits. But my focus in this write up is not on why this crowd with degrees find it difficult to get a job, my primary concern here is the dilemma and social pressure in their minds about looking for the alternatives when their primary plans fail. The pressure gets developed to such an extent that a person becomes more concerned about fulfilling the expectations of these peers in anyhow without trying to go for other choices after failing consistently in his primary plans. There are enough examples of such people desiring to try something else, may be start a business or choose some other stream after failing at the primary plans but they feel a bit reluctant to move on, not only because they lack financial backing but the main reason being the expectations of people to do good at the primary plan.
As we know everything starts from zero level. Take an example of owning a business, businesses usually start from zero level involving less risks. You can’t directly jump to compete with the big businesses in the market, controlled by some mafias and knowing you have limited financial backing. You always start small and then try to expand in the later phase after some stabilisation. This, starting small, doesn’t go down the throat of the family members, relatives, neighbours and other peers. Instead of backing you, people start to think primitively, gossip and chitchat that look at him, he has spent whole his life in studies, collecting degrees after degrees and what is he doing now is just owning a small business and it won’t take him anywhere. Here you need to remember that if others judge and form superficial opinions of you, you need to retrieve that no one knows your capabilities better than you know yourself. Make them reform their opinions and you don’t have to compromise for anything, do what suits your mind and what you are good at.
It is always when you need a backing from people, instead of backing and admiring most of them will try to, intentionally or unintentionally, bully you. But mind that your mind has the capability of treating all this in either way- positive or negative. You need to make it constructive and go at it strongly, which is the quality of a strong mind.
